It was a fantastic feeling getting Ask Away live on Friday, and it has been wonderful watching both people and the parties engaging with the site. We set ourselves a tight deadline and of course we have a lot more we’d like to do with the site, but the feedback has been very positive and in line with the things we have planned.
There have always been two questions critical to the success of Ask Away. The first is, will the politicians actually engage?
From today, the top question each day should be answered by all the parties, but I suspect it might take some of them a little while to get organised. Doing something new is always challenging, but hopefully we’re setting a precedent for how these things work in the future, and there are certainly a lot of good intentions!
The other thing that is going to help is seeing other parties active on the site - NZ First MP Tracey Martin went through last night and answered an amazing forty questions, showing everyone else how it’s done. I noticed people immediately encouraging the National party to keep up via Twitter.
Looking forward to @nznationalparty senior MP's answering soon on @AskAwayNZ. C'mon guys @TraceyMartinMP is making us look technophobic
— Joel Rowan (@RealJoelRowan)
August 10, 2014
I also enjoyed Tracey's way of answering, and would encourage spokespeople to use her conversational style, saying things like “Great question” or “As Chris said…”. We’re going to build in ‘likes’ for the answers so that we can see what people respond well to, but my hunch is that human, conversational answers will go down well.
@BMHayward @AskAwayNZ @suemoroney I am really loving this opportunity to answer questions - much better than speaking at people :)
— Tracey Martin (@TraceyMartinMP)
August 10, 2014
Of course, if that comes at the cost of a specific stance in the reply, I’d like to hope people will call it out, and, as journalist Megan Whelan said, “People like me are still going to be looking at the answers going - hold on, you didn’t really answer the question”. On that point, it will be very interesting to see how this content interacts with traditional forms of media.
The other, most important question is one which Matthew Beveridge raised in his blog post about the projects. “The real test will be if those who are not already politically engaged start to use them, or if they will just become tools for those who are already engaged”. So far, it’s likely that the majority of users are those who are already engaged, and that was always going to be the case to begin with.
However, with accessible questions like “Why is the cost of rent so high?” at number 5 on the trending list, I think this is going to be a good resource once there are a lot of answers on there to compare. Now that we have so many questions on the site, our marketing will change its messaging to be less about asking a question and more about the site as an easy way to compare the parties, specifically to target this less engaged audience.
At the very least, Ask Away is showing to anyone that visits it that the parties are interested and responding, and this impression will only increase as more answers come in each day.
